Hey there and thank you for taking the time to read! I bought into the Wolcen Early Access about a week ago and have since put way too many hours into the game. I have leveled two characters to 20 and began the process of Veteran expedition progression (currently comfortable around Vet+4 but progressing more and more each evening). But I have noticed a monstrous disparity in relative performance between my two characters; an Ailment Sorceror (Toxic) and a Turret Gunslinger build.

My Sorceror has nearly 300 Wisdom and over a 50% chance to proc the Toxic status effect on enemies for a whopping 360 damage per stack and due to Passive Skill choices, I can stack around 20 applications on an enemy. On paper, this sounds pretty incredible. In practice, it's underwhelming. With my lesser geared Gunslinger I can easily crit 8-10k damage with numerous abilities like Havoc Orb, Warpath, Gunslinger's Brand (this one is nutty) and have a tremendous (borderline overpowered??) amount of consistent damage from two turrets plugging away. I can melt a boss with 100k+ health in moments. My Ailment Sorceror only dreams of doing that sort of DPS. It takes a relatively long time to build up stacks of the various ailments (I use fire, frost and lightning skills to get a buff that applies those statuses and then I channel a Toxic Annihilation to ramp up the Toxic ailment). If I'm very careful, and very lucky with boss telegraphs, I can sometimes see 2700-3600 damage ticks of my toxic stacks, but in the time it takes to even get to that level my other character would have killed the boss three times over.

It is very satisfying to twist numerous elemental skills and ramp up various stacks of ailments and watch the enemies melt away, but the damage does not seem to validate the considerable effort and sacrifice to play in this fashion. A rather large chunk of your "purple" passive skill spheres are dedicated to the Ailment-style of wizard play so one would presume you want this to be a viable end-game avenue, but I am not seeing the performance so far. I can very easily see myself progress all the way to Veteran+9 on my Gunslinger build over the course of the next week or two, but my (at this point better geared; with several uniques and legendaries and 300+ wisdom) Ailment-Sorceror can barely handle lower tiers.

I wouldn't want to highlight a perceived problem without suggesting some solutions, so here goes;

Damage over time from status effects should ramp up significantly faster than they currently do, and do significantly more damage than they currently do, in order to be competitive with other builds at a similar gear and skill level.

Due to the relative fragility of most Sorceror builds (a topic for another thread!) it's difficult to survive against extremely difficult enemies long enough to truly realize the potential of ailment stacks offered by your current passive skill choices. I would suggest adding a Passive Skills such as:

"Necrotic Entropy - Your ailments have a 50% chance of proc'ing TWICE when applied to a target"

"Volatile Contagion - Your ailments have a 50% when they tick to jump to all enemies within 5 meters of the target. This chance is increased to 100% when the target dies"

"Ailment Synergist - Each unique ailment applied to the target increases the damage of all ailments by 25%" (So having a fire DoT, frost DoT, lightning DoT and toxic DoT on the target would be essentially 100% additional DoT damage)

Thanks for your attention and thank you for making such a fun ARPG :)

• Cheers